World of Warcraft subscriptions surge thanks to amazing Legion expansion

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World of Warcraft’s player base has been on a downward trend for years. Granted, in Blizzard’s case, that’s a very relative measure. The 5.5 million subscribers the company reported in November 2015 was a low point that the title hadn’t hit since 2005, but WoW still dwarfs other massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). When Blizzard announced last year that WoW had fallen to 5.5 million subscribers, it also said it wouldn’t be sharing subscriber information going forward. But a quote from a recent interview with game designer Tom Chilton seems to imply that the company’s figures have leaped skyward once again.

According to an interview in the Polish magazine Pixel, WoW’s subscription figures have surged to 10.1 million in the wake of Legion’s launch, nearly doubling the company’s reliable total. While this still doesn’t bring WoW back up to its glory days, it very nearly does — as the chart below shows, WoW peaked in mid-2010 with 12 million subscribers. Blizzard, however, refuses to confirm or deny this figure, only saying it won’t provide data on subscriptions going forward, and that Chilton did not state a figure of 10.1 million subscribers to Pixel magazine. Whether Chilton intended to speak off-the-record or a language issue caused the problem is unclear.

Data from the now-defunct MMOData.net

Bringing subscription numbers back up to 10.1 million, even if its temporary, would be a huge boost for Blizzard — and WoW is still the behemoth in the industry, even if it has lost a little weight. While I hate to rely on anecdotal data for subscription information, I’ve seen a number of old friends and guildmates popping back to play the expansion and staying for more than the handful of weeks required to level up and complete the initial content.

A well-deserved success

We’re working on a full review of Legion, but in light of the subscription jump, I’ll say this: Based on my experience thus far, World of Warcraft: Legion is the best expansion Blizzard has ever released. While I can’t claim to have played them all, I was an early closed beta tester for World of Warcraft and played the game from early 2004 through the end of Cataclysm and the early zones of Mists of Pandaria. With Legion, Blizzard decided to emphasize a single-player storyline — and while WoW’s lore is fairly standard fantasy fare, focusing tightly on your player’s individual character makes the game more interesting.

Overall, this is the most polished I’ve ever seen an expansion be this soon after launch. That doesn’t mean there are no rough spots — play an MMO long enough and you discover there are always rough spots, and since the game constantly evolves, you often get them all sanded out about six months before the next expansion launches. I’ve never been particularly interested in the story behind WoW until this expansion, and I’m still running around finishing zone quests just to see how the plot plays out. There have always been individual quest chains in WoW that commanded that kind of interest, but there are more of them in Legion — and a lot more for individual players to do without worrying about signing up for the 4-6 hour raiding grindfests that often made the game inaccessible to those with limited amounts of time, or who simply didn’t want to play with 39 other cantankerous people while trying to progress through end-game content.

The slideshow above highlights some of the new zones and environments of the Broken Isles, WoW’s latest new continent to explore. Feel free to drop your comments below — do you like how Legion has evolved, or did you prefer one of the previous expansions? While there’s no guarantee that Blizzard will retain a larger player base in the next few months, Legion’s story and overall gameplay have been strong enough that I plan to stick around a little while to see what happens next. Getting back into the game was rough, but I’m glad I did.

Tagged In

“Blizzard has issued a statement denying that Tom Chilton provided the 10.1 million subscriber number to the magazine. “This was a misquote, or some kind of misunderstanding on the part of the journalist,” a rep said. “Our policy for almost a year now is that we do not talk about subscriber numbers, and Tom did not do that with this publication.”

*shrug* That wasn’t the case last night and Blizzard apparently gave conflicting statements to Polygon, who quotes them as neither confirming nor denying. Furthermore, the fact that the figure might not be accurate doesn’t change my own preview.

Entire article *not* invalid. :)

Plyphon

Admittedly, that was a bit of a dramatic sign off.

I think Polygon have updated their stuff too.

Joel Hruska

They seem to have amended the text but not the title.

Erick Ordoñez

Honestly, I can say it is one of the best expasions, true. However it does demands lots of time to actually gather resources which are quite expensive at the auction house when in a rush and to find a decent roster at LFR raiding or Mythics dungeons runs. I also have to say I’m still quite shocked about some characters being “removed” (i.e. murdered/defeated) in the lore such as , spoiler alert: King Varyan and Ysera. Nevertheless, the beauty of the Broken Isles does bring back some memoirs from Burning Crusade and WOTLK.

Joel Hruska

Wow heroes are often comic-book dead. They really may have killed Varian and Ysera, to be sure. Heck, I almost hope they did, since I don’t like comic-book death very much. But it wouldn’t surprise me if they didn’t, either.

darkich

Now if only the graphics were up to date, this game would blow minds

Eliavy

Blizzard recently updated the graphics and the way the camera works, causing a sizeable minority of players to either have to stop playing or play while getting headaches and nausea. The worst part to me is that the changes weren’t announced in patch notes and at least a couple of people who are prone to seizures had them because of the unacknowledged changes.

disqus_1bNDZBPsgj

They got rid of the action cam, unfortunately…

Eliavy

The action cam was getting turned on for some players without their knowledge.

However, with or without the action cam, I am no longer able to play WoW. I’m not the only one.

I’ve never had this sort of issue with any other game or MMO, but looking at WoW since the changes causes me excruciating eye strain headaches that last for a long time.

Joel Hruska

Can you provide some documentation / links that discuss this? I came back to WoW in August and have been playing through to the present day. I have not noticed any difference in how the camera functions since then. In fact, WoW’s camera function has been roughly the same since closed beta — left-mouse-button rotates the camera (but not your character), right-mouse button rotates your character and the camera. Scroll wheel moves you in and out.

It looks like I completely missed the entire Action Cam debacle but that feature was supposed to have been removed. Are you saying that problems have persisted since it was?

Interesting. I will look into it. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.

Eliavy

You’re welcome. I’m glad that you are showing interest in this as Blizzard’s response has been anemic.

Joel Hruska

A few clarifying questions if you don’t mind.

You say you are now unable to play WoW. Can you explain why? I have not noticed any significant difference in how the camera handled between when I left in 2012 and came back in August. I also have experimented with running the game on a 3440×1440 display (21:9) as well as a 27-inch 1920×1080 panel (16:9). What, specifically, has changed about the camera other than the action cam issue?

I have noticed some UI issues that don’t seem related to what you are describing but may be indicative of some other bugs. The UI scaling toggle seems to do nothing no matter what display mode (Fullscreen, Windowed, Borderless) I use. And I constantly have to reset my gamma controls in the Nvidia Control Panel. The game is much too dark by default and something (possibly not related to WoW) continually resets my system to use default system settings for gamma rather than the Nvidia-specified settings.

Eliavy

I really wish I knew what the root problem is for me. The rendering of the background seems to be the biggest problem. Even looking at the screen without moving my character starts aggravating my eyes. Moving, especially flying, makes it much worse.

There is more screen shake than formerly and more objects cause rapid zooming in and out. There is more flashing on the screen, too.

I tried changing a lot of settings, but the only thing that seemed to relieve it a bit was when the max cam addon allowed me to zoom to 45-50 yards. That allowed me to play for an hour before my eyes started killing me.

I must add that I haven’t bothered to log in since playing through the demon hunter starting area in August, which I was only able to do because a friend carried me through it. While there have been changes since then, based on my reading of the forums, the issues that affected me have not been fixed. Since minimal amounts of playing caused it so I could not read or look at a screen for long periods without pain, the risk hasn’t been worth it. It took over two weeks to fully recover after playing about six hours over seven days.

I did see a comment on the WoW forums that hardware may now affect the way the game appears. I will give you my specs if you like. My husband had no ill effects playing WoW on the same computer, though.

Joel Hruska

What does “rendering of the background” mean?

Here are some of the same screenshots as in the article above, but blown up to full size.

In these screenshots, what part of the screen would correspond to the “background” that’s making you nauseated?

The fact that you experience nausea without movement is somewhat strange. I can’t promise you a solution, but I will try to find out what might be causing the problem. It certainly is possible for certain kinds of motion to cause issues; I can’t watch movies like the Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield because they rely on shaky, hand-held-style footage and I find that extremely nauseating. I couldn’t watch the 2D version of James Cameron’s Avatar in theaters either – I had no problem with it at home, but in the movie theater all the jumping, soaring, twisting scenery was too much. I had to leave or risk becoming ill all over the next row.

Your hardware specs would be welcome, but what there are a few things I’d also like to see. It would be useful to see a screenshot of your graphics settings (both the “Graphics” and “Advanced” tabs).

The other thing I’d like to know is how fast the game typically renders on your system. To measure this, just hit Ctrl-R and rotate the camera or run around a bit. An approximate range of values is fine — 50-60 FPS, 60-70, 25-35, etc. Sometimes nausea when viewing motion can be linked to how smooth the motion is (or isn’t).

Eliavy

I have not been experiencing nausea, but extremely bad eye strain. It feels a little like watching a poorly made 3D movie; my eyes just can’t focus on the screen correctly since the changes. I can tell you, though, that the game is definitely still unplayable for me.

The FPS while flying around Stormwind was 30-40.

I made a lot of changes to the game settings to try to make it playable. Prior to the 7.0.3 pre-patch, I was able to play on ultra with no problems. The screen while moving does feel jerkier, as well, although the edges aren’t tearing like they were when I quit in August.

I can’t even remember what all I changed, but here are the settings as I had them when I gave up trying to fix it: https://imgur.com/a/Vz6zH

Those settings are extremely low for your GPU. Of course, you said you’ve been changing things, so I don’t know what they used to be before.

One thing I do every new patch is to turn off the full-screen glow effect, which I find gives me eyestrain too:

In the chat window, type or copy/paste:
/console ffxglow 0

A few other things about your message caught my eye. The graphics preset of 2 is very low for your hardware… perhaps this is just where you ended up after trying to fix things, but that’s really low.

You also wrote that your fps flying around Stormwind was 30-40. With a R9 380, I would think you would be getting better than that even on preset 10… I have a GTX 760 2GB, slower than your card, and I just set mine to 10 and flew around Stormwind and got solid 60 fps (vsync on) at 1920×1080 (using DX11). Mine is a low-pop realm, though, so there may not have been as many players in my quick test as when you did it. (FWIW, I don’t use high settings like that for normal play; it tends to bog down during world boss kills and PvP, so I kept reducing the settings incrementally until I almost never saw dips below 60 fps. I ended up around 7 for the preset, before my personal preference tweaks.)

I know some people have said that WoW is more optimized for Nvidia, but even if that is true, you should at least be able to match the performance of a 760 with your card (if you’re running higher resolution than I am, that might explain it, of course).

I had horrendous micro-stuttering and occasional pauses of a few hundred ms during WoD (long before the Legion changes)… I kept messing with settings and I could never get it to go away. I eventually discovered it was my security suite causing it (its HIPS component puts hooks everywhere; it is not hard to see how it could cause some issues). I had exited the software before as a test, and it didn’t help; only completely uninstalling it worked.

Eliavy

I keep the ffxglow setting at 0 myself. I have a macro to switch it between 0 and 1 in the instances I have need of it.

The graphics recommended setting is 8 or something; I can’t remember. I did have it turned down low to see if it would help with the visual problems I was having. It did some, but not nearly enough.

Before 7.0.3, I believe my frame rate was higher. I’m not sure exactly how much higher, but certainly not as low as what it is now. Isn’t Stormwind cross realm now, making the size of the realm irrelevant as to how many avatars are in the city at a time?

I do have an old toaster with a very old Nvidia card; I’d try it out, but I don’t think it would even be capable of running Legion.

May I ask which security suite was causing the problem for you?

Ascaris

Agnitum Outpost Security Suite pro. Agnitum was bought out by Yandex a while ago, and my “lifetime” license for OSS stopped being lifetime. If it had not been for that, though, I probably would have plodded along, not realizing it was OSS that was making WoW run badly!

I don’t know if the capital cities are cross-realm now. I know they used to be one of the few places that were not cross-realm; I used to play with someone from another realm frequently, and when we flew into Stormwind, we both phased to our respective realms. You may be right about that, though… I have not paid that much attention to it in a while.

The performance I got was flying over SW… when I got on my ground mount and rode around, preset 10 wasn’t cutting it anymore… it got a lot more choppy. I set the preset back to 7 (which is what it recommends for my 760) and used that as a base. I always make a few changes… vsync ON, triple buffer ON, reduce a few of the things like shadow quality, depth effects, etc., a little bit, set post-processing AA on (the other AA settings anti-alias the text on nameplates; I hate that!)

There definitely was a drop in performance with the 7.x patch. The settings I’d previously used to maintain solid 60 fps with vsync on no longer were able to maintain 60 in a lot of areas. I had to detune the settings quite a bit to get it to work. Eye candy is nice and all, but smoothness (and lack of tearing) is much more important to me.

I read the post on the official site you linked about the various changes. I didn’t really notice most of them. I know the console command to allow much greater camera distances no longer works, and that is annoying, and so is the propensity for the game to allow crap to get between the camera and the character, obscuring the view (particularly bad in some buildings in Suramar City… get rid of those curtains!). I didn’t notice the rest of the stuff… the camera movement seems the same to me, and I don’t see any more flickering or anything like that than before.

What is the old Nvidia card? You may be surprised at how well WoW can work on older hardware (depending on how old “old” is). My Core 2 Duo laptop with a GT 220m GPU runs wow nicely on preset 2. It is not able to maintain 60 fps all the time, though, so I use adaptive vsync in the Nvidia settings (vsync only on if fps >= refresh of 60). I am surprised (pleasantly) at how well the little laptop runs WoW… I bought it mostly for that purpose 8 years ago, and it still does it! Not with the same graphic settings it used to, but the fact that it is playable at all is quite nice. (I’m not really sure it is the same laptop, though; I have upgraded most of its internals, so while it looks the same on the outside, is it really the same laptop?)

This looks better, in many ways, than FFXIV, and there’s no invisible walls or fake backgrounds… I have most MMORPGs, an EVGA GTX 1060 SC, and WoW, surprisingly, is the most pleasing overall. Draw distance sucks and gets blurry in Black Desert, for example. Polish is what separates Blizz games…

powerwiz

I dont know why people care about the number of subs. Many MMOS like EQ 1 are still alive. This game will be around for many many years.

disqus_1bNDZBPsgj

30+ like Zelda

powerwiz

Exactly they sue this metric to somehow say its over or more popular but who cares for the players? All you have to do is get rid of people scale down servers, merge them. Literally look up EQ 1 it was like in the hundreds of thousands of players max and its still being maintained. Sony never would do that if they were making money and whatever people play it enjoy it immensely.

World of Warcraft with such a high volume user base will be around probably for decades as well.

LanceHarmstrong

So shifting to a more single-player-centric model is indicative of good design in an /MMO/? Since when? The community is ruined by cross server queues for literally everything, the economy is bloated beyond repair, the diablo devs have gone nuts with itemization & stats, I could go on.

Stop calling it WoW. It has become World of Diablocraft. RIP WoW 2004-2010.

Cestarian

In other news, there are people still playing everquest.

In even more news, there are people still playing runescape.

In other news, very interestingly there are people who use non-smart cellphones in this day and age, can you believe it?

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